Trump wants to start from scratch on the Paris climate deal

Imagine for a second how tough it is to get 187 nations to agree on anything. The United Nations managed just that in December, with a largely non-binding climate change agreement that covers most of the world’s greenhouse gas pollution.

Donald Trump, naturally, thinks he could do better. The presumptive Republican nominee hopes to start from scratch on laying out a post-2020 roadmap for climate change, or so he told Reuters’ Emily Flitter and Steve Holland in an exclusive interview.

“I will be looking at that very, very seriously, and at a minimum I will be renegotiating those agreements, at a minimum,” he said. “And at a maximum I may do something else.”

Trump doesn’t consider himself a “big fan” of the existing agreement because he believes the United States — historically the world’s biggest polluter — got the worse end of the deal, while other countries, namely China, won’t adhere to their promises.

Look at the political situations in the two nations, however, and you’ll notice it’s the United States, not China, that’s currently overrun with politicians who think climate change is a foreign-manufactured conspiracy and want to pull out from the agreement.